[B-Greek] Caragounis' book

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Nov 27 09:37:18 EST 2004


At 8:31 AM -0500 11/27/04, Barry Hofstetter wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "R Yochanan Bitan Buth" <ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il>
>To: <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
>Sent: Saturday, November 27, 2004 7:49 AM
>Subject: [B-Greek] Caragounis' book
>
>
>> Wilkins HRWTHSEN
>>>Now I would be indebted to you if you could give me a specific example or
>> two indicating that a knowledge of modern Greek is as useful for the NT as
>> Attic (I might then better understand your viewpoint), but in any case I
>> respect your opinion and don't want to bother you with such an exercise (I'm
>> sure you have better and more pressing things to do).>
>>
>> As a specific example, my last email listed Mk 10:51, whose naturalness is
>> closer to modern Greek than ancient. (This does not mean that it might not
>> echo something like KI ER'EH 'that I would see', as well.) Examples like
>> these are others have already been pointed out by Jannaris and Robertson and
>> are a continual comment in a book like Horrocks 1997.
>> I have noticed and met some modern Greek speakers who seemed to have an
>> easier time retaining a fuller vocabulary and reading ancient literature 'on
>> the fly' than those who only controlled the ancient. Having said that, those
>> people also confess that they had to learn and study and read ancient Greek
>> in massive doses in order to reach that level. So there appears to be a
>> potential fluency issue that could be matched/neutralized if we learned our
>> ancient Greek fluently. Unfortunately, most do not learn the Attic or Koine
>> to '(reading) fluency'.
>> BTW, I tend to see Attic and Koine as one big language. I rather doubt that
>> Josephus or Luke treated Plato as a different language, while I think that
>> they would very much call modern greek ETERAN GLWSSAN. And you are right
>> that subtracting (=masking) pieces of a language, like going from standard
>> English to Tok Pisin, is easy. But building new pieces of a language in
>> going the other direction is much slower and difficult.
>
>When I was an undergraduate, way back in the 20th century, we would
>occasionally
>get a native Hellene in our Greek classes, particularly if it were something
>relatively easy, like Xenophon or the NT.  These folks were looking for easy
>elective credits (not where most American students would find them!).  It
>quickly became clear that they were no more or less proficient than any
>American
>student, and that in fact their knowledge of modern Greek was occasionally a
>hindrance rather than a help, particularly when it came to vocabulary items
>similar in form to modern Greek, but with quite different semantic range.
>For a
>Hellene to learn ancient Greek is like a native speaker of English learning to
>read Beowulf...  I agree with your comments on the relationship between Koine
>and Attic.  The differences would be roughly equivalent to the differences
>between current and Elizabethan English.  When we read documents from that
>period, we recognize it as English, but really strange at times...

Yes, and it takes a considerable effort for one who has started out
learning Attic to start reading Homer. I think my own sequence of studies,
as I've noted before in this forum, was extraordinary and not the way I'd
choose to go: NT Koine in the Freshman year, Homer in the Sophomore year,
Sophocles and Aristotle in the Junior year; it required an intense and
immense effort and I'd certainly prefer to go from Homer to Attic to
Koine--OR, what we did at Washington U was give Freshman classical Attic
and then let them do Homer or NT Koine. But a relatively simple experience
for me early in my teaching career was discovering George Thomson's little
book, _The Greek Language_ published in 1960 by Heffer in Cambridge and
long since out of print; it's a quick overview of the historical
development of Greek from ancient to modern concluding with a short
anthology of representative texts from antiquity to 20th century (the
Nikandra inscription to Cavafy); the selections were well annotated,
included several papyrus letters from the early Christian centuries, a
couple Byzantine and later medieval documents, etc.--and they ranged from
an Egyptian child's almost illiterate letter to his father in Alexandria
and a colloquial account of a ship coming from Constantinople to report its
capture by the Turks, a selection illustrating differences between Attic
usage and colloquial Koine from Phrynicus in the 2nd c. AD, etc. The marvel
to me while working through these well-annotated selections, was that there
really is a discernible continuity in the speaking and writing of the Greek
language over the centuies.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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